Hickory sticks

Sporting News, The, August 15, 1994 by Pat Jordan, Mark Newman

So, you're a baseball fan with nowhere to go. The major league strike is upon us, and you're suffering withdrawal pains and anger, and you can't even go to a stadium to take it out on the objects of your anger--the players and owners who have betrayed you once again. Well then, maybe now is the time to reacquaint yourself with the way the game was meant to be played, in small towns and small stadiums in the low minor leagues, where the game never changes, the players never strike, the owners are almost invisible, and the stadiums are not huge, concrete amphitheaters, but rather cozy, little parks where everyone knows everyone else. But you'd better hurry, because even those cozy, little parks, with their garish-green, wood-plank bleachers and corrugated-tin roofs, are on their way to oblivion. They are being replaced by miniature mirror images of major league stadiums, like the one in Hickory, N.C. The town has a $5-million stadium, and a total of 283,727 fans came in 1993 to watch a Class-A team finish half a game out of last place.

That year, the Hickory Crawdads, a new White Sox farm team in the South Atlantic League, set a league attendance record, averaging 4,053 fans over 70 home games in a town of fewer than 20,000 people. The Crawdads never drew fewer than 1,000 in western-central North Carolina. This season, they have kept coming.

So, why did they come? The reasons are many, but they all have to do with the way small towns in America, especially the South, have changed over the past 50 years, and how those changes have affected their townspeople, and their minor league baseball teams.

When asked, the Hickory fans will give a lot of reasons to explain why they came in such record numbers to watch a woeful Class-A team lose 88 of its 140 games in '93. They'll always mention, first, the team's mascot and logo, Conrad the Crawdad (a sort of mini, fresh-water lobster not found plentifully around Hickory), which is responsible for what the town's mayor, William R. McDonald III, calls "Crawdadmania." Conrad is bright red, with two big lobster claws for hands, huge black eyes, and two white feelers sticking out of his black Crawdads cap. Conrad appears everywhere in the Crawdads' slick 1994 souvenir program, in ads for new cars, printing companies, department stores, and even one for the Catawba Memorial Hospital in which Conrad is lying in a hospital bed, his eyes half-lidded, a thermometer in his mouth while a pretty nurse takes his temperature by holding his claw.

At Crawdad games, many young boys wear imitation Conrad costumes. Their young, teen-aged sisters, in lieu of makeup, wear a little drawing of Conrad on their cheek. In fact, Conrad has been so successful a marketing ploy for the Crawdads that in the team's first season, it ranked No. 3 in merchandise sales of all minor league teams. (Only the Carolina Mudcats and the Durham Bulls, also in North Carolina, surpassed them.) When one Crawdad fan, Miya Teague, a Hickory high school physical education teacher, attended a White Sox game the fans around her were so enamored of all her Conradabilia that, she says, "I could have sold all the stuff off my back." Her 13-year-old daughter, Amanda, wears so much Conradabilia to school -- watch, pin, ring, necklace, T-shirt, cap -- that her classmates call her "The Human Crawdad."

"To be honest," Miya says, "I didn't like the name at first, but it's grown on me." Miya, like most Crawdad fans, seems more in love with the memorabilia of baseball than the game itself. Her most prized possession is a practice jersey autographed by Michael Jordan, which, she says, "I don't want too many people to know about."

After Conrad, the fans talk mostly about their beautiful new stadium, and what fun it is to attend a game there. L.P. Frans Stadium (the Frans family donated the land) has a vast parking lot on a hill and the neat, if nondescript red-brick stadium is set below it. The stadium is spotlessly clean and its pretty, pastel-colored seats offer an unobstructed view of the perfectly manicured playing field and beyond its outfield fences (plastered with more than 90 advertisements at a price of $2,500 each per season) the trees and rolling hills of rural North Carolina. The statdium's food concession stands serve nachos and barbecue and beer and even cappucino from "Kathryn's of Hickory, speciality catering." The concessions are located high up behind the home-plate stands along a wide aisle that rings the stadium and is usually so filled with fans promenading back and forth during a game that it has earned the name "The Social Aisle." There, children climb jungle gyms under the watchful eyes of their mothers. Teen-aged boys, looking a little manic, fire baseballs into the fast-pitch net. Teen-aged girls have their pictures taken with their favorite Crawdad player. Then, of course, there is the boutique where fans can buy their Conradabilia.

Along the left-field foul line, there's a picnic area for less affluent fans who can't afford concession prices and have to bring their own food. For the more affluent, there is the private Crawdads' Restaurant high up the right-field stands. Curiously, the restaurant doesn't serve crawdad, possibly out of respect for its mascot. The restaurant serves hamburgers and Mexican dishes along with beer and wine. Its walls are covered with new copies of old tintypes of famous baseball players, such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, fishing on a boat in Long Island Sound. There also are photos of some players who are not so famous, except in Hickory, such as the 1952 Mooresville Little League All-Stars, who went to the Williamsport World Series. The boys all have crew cuts, long necks and big ears.